PEOPLE BEFORE PAPER!

Not to be glib or oversimplify, but the reason children “known to CPS” die is because evil exists. 

That said, the reason CPS* has very little chance to help protect children known to the agency is not so sensational or complicated as caseworker incompetence or indolence. Some, not all, deaths of children “known to CPS” occur because caseworkers miss the opportunity to protect children-at-risk because caseworkers are pushing papers instead.

Upon taking a job with Child Protective Services, it didn’t take me long to realize how to balance the always overburdened budget.  Simply fire half the caseworkers and replace them with clerical workers because most of what caseworkers do is clerical.

 Caseworkers can do clerical work, that’s fine (though not good stewardship of tax dollars).  The problem is, clerical workers cannot do child protection.  Who’s protecting the children if their caseworkers only have time to push papers?

For every minute that those charged with protecting America’s children are performing data input…or playing taxi-cab…or monitoring custody cases or cases open only to subsidize services…or covering visits for families that are not on your caseload…or attending to any number of other redundant and/or superfluous minutiae better done by non-casework staff, caseworkers lose a minute that could be spent protecting children. 

When we read on the front page of our local newspaper about a “child known to CPS” dying, an oft-overlooked factor in the horrifying tragedy is that the caseworker -- who could have been resonating with the child’s and family’s case, actually reading the case file, connecting the dots of the family’s history and dynamic, interviewing credible collateral contacts, in effect: piecing together the big picture that reveals imminent danger -- was doing clerical work instead.

The ugly truth is that children always have and always will die at the hands of their parents, whether they are “known to CPS” or not…whether CPS even exists or not. 

The important thing is that we not, as we typically have, let these well-publicized deaths, provide license for us to ruin the lives of thousands more children by “erring on the side of the child” and removing them from their less than imminently-dangerous homes.  Instead, we need to focus more closely on the true, albeit mundane problems, including: caseworkers pushing papers, rather than protecting kids.

Children “known to CPS” die, in part, because those charged with protecting them were pushing papers instead.


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*Note: Although “Child Protective Service” agencies continuously change their name (one can only assume in an effort to fly below the radar) I will use the abbreviation “CPS” throughout as it is the most descriptive and recognizable of what the agency’s intention was originally.